Nook Touch Hits $65 on Ebay – Is This the Beginning of The End of B&N?

A new deal came across my inbox this morning, and for the first time in a long while I was surprised. Barnes & Noble has set a new low for the Nook Touch. You can now get the refurbished unit for a mere $65 on Ebay. That' s a record for B&N, and it's under half the original retail for this less than a year old ereader.

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

Seriously, you are killing me here. “Kindle Fire Refurb – $139” – you clearly mention that it is a refurbished model and make no commentary. In this article, a 34% discount on a refurbished unit not available retail is doom for the company.

Meanwhile, fjtorres is of the opinion that B&N should dump refurbished units onto the international market as new products … I’m sure customers will appreciate that.

Or perhaps B&N is still most of its products in stores and they don’t see low prices on used products shipped from a central warehouse as threatening their product’s value?

They’ve been flogging “refurbs” for *nine* months now, at ever-dropping prices. So this is not a new thing.

Given that many refurbs are actually excess inventory and not returns *and* B&N’s US market share has been flat for those same nine months, there is good reason to suspect they are up to their gills in unsold *new* STRs.

Nate — This post says “Nook Color and Nook Tablet,” which WOULD be incredible — but then I clicked the link to the earlier post, and apparently you meant Nook TOUCH. Might want to fix that in this post.

It’s funny. Nook and other e-ink devices are perfectly good devices, but they play second fiddle to the android devices from Amazon and BN (and soon device makers not tied to a bookstore). I have to wonder how many authors really need the DRM protections offered by the bookstores. If authors started using more DRM-free ebooks, then these cheapo devices could be simpler to use.

“Barnes & Noble is trying to strike at Amazon with another device. At its labs in Silicon Valley last week, engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring.”

You know, B&N might have had a bunch of returns with the 1.1 update because of a WiFi bug that prevented people from fully accessing some routers and hotspots. This could account for it. That bug has been fixed in 1.2, so perhaps these fire sales will go away.

What this probably means is a new e ink Nook this summer. The Nook Touch rolled out in the first week of June. A new one could be in the works (wasn’t there a rumor of a new Nook a few weeks back?). The Nook Touch could be made smaller and lighter like the new Kindles and new Sony.

Why is this surprising? I don’t think it was ever BN’s intention or Amazon’s for that matter to make money off of hardware.

They’ll make money off the content – Amazon’s strategy too. And, I’m sure you’re aware of the price analysis of Amazon’s continual price drops on the Kindle and the speculation if they’ll eventually give Kindle’s to customers for free. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Bezos made that decision at some point.

It’s true now that they cannot turn a profit on hardware, but that only happened in late 2011. Amazon made money on the K2, K3 and original Kindles. Even after the price drop in mid 2010, Amazon was still probably making money.